A Robust Secure and High Capacity Image Watermarking Scheme for Information Exchange in Distributed Collaborative Networked Intelligent Measurement Systems

In many industrial environments applications, for example, those involving intelligent measurement systems, distributed networked collaborative virtual environments, tele-control, biomedical intelligent systems with interchange of individuals private health information, to name a few, there is a need to securely exchange digital images or other multi-media information among the various local or remote industrial components. In this paper, and for that purpose, we propose a novel image watermarking and information hiding technique for recovery and authentication of hidden images against tampering by utilizing the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and the Arnold’s Transform. We show how the proposed technique (a) allows for relatively higher capacity capability in securely embedding not just a watermark image, for authentication purposes, but also a hidden secret image while preserving the transparency in the resulting “watermarked” carrier image (b) allows embedding of gray-scale images and is not limited to embedding binary ones (c) allows redundancy in the hidden information for better recovery in case of image tampering such as cropping, (d) allows for security in the hidden image information. The proposed technique utilizes all three RGB color channels of a carrier image for embedding information. This is to provide a high degree of redundancy for information recovery in case of unauthorized tampering attacks. Furthermore, correction matrices for hidden and/or watermark images are calculated and are also embedded in the carrier image. As we show, the proposed techniques provides tamper detection and recovery against unauthorized tampering such as image cropping, blurring, pixel tampering. We also show robustness of the proposed scheme to JPEG compression and encryption.